Ask Slashdot: Are You Apocalypse-Useful?

An anonymous reader writes: "Young people, when choosing a profession, are often told to 'do what you love.' That's why we have experts in such abstruse fields as medieval gymel. But let's talk hypotheticals: if there's a worldwide catastrophe in which civilization is interrupted, somebody specializing in gymel wouldn't provide much use to fellow survivors. In a post-apocalypse world, medical doctors would be useful, as would most scientists and engineers. The bad news for Slashdotters is that decades without computers would render computer science and related professions useless. What do you consider to be the most useful and mostly useless post-apocalypse professions? How long would it take for society to rebuild enough for your profession to be useful?"

Re:WHAT?

[crunchygranola]

>There is a massive cache of existing technology which can be repurposed to rebuild society.

None of which works when the electricity dies.

There are a huge number of electrical generators in existence - almost every vehicle on the planet has one for example. Anything that can run a motor can produce electricity. Electricity would be precious perhaps, but absent? Hardly.

Re:WHAT?

[chuckugly]

Actually it was a form of Roman military discipline in which 1 in 10 were killed, not a reduction of 9 out of 10. The name is derived from the Latin for "removal of a tenth".